Shatter Film Spotlight

Today’s film spotlight focuses on the feature film Shatter directed by Chris Schwartz.

What is the title of your film and what inspired said title?

The title SHATTER was mainly inspired by the theme of the film; that reality is often a thinly veiled layer of glass, created by the lies we choose to believe. Only the key to the truth can shatter this reality and allow us to see clearly once more.

Tell us a little bit about the story and origins of your film.

The story follows a parallel journey into one man’s sanity and another man’s insanity as they each struggle to find a key to unlock their own truths. At the forefront of the story, a small-town Detective tries to uncover the killer behind a young schoolteacher murder. However, he finds himself relying on the prime suspect, an escaped schizophrenic patient named David. Soon, David’s cryptic clues drive the detective deeper into unraveling a mystery even more bizarre than the crime itself. A lot of the inspiration stemmed from those old gumshoe detective films I used to watch as a kid and I’ve always been fascinated with the film noir cinematic style and themes that are continuously repeated in a lot of my work. Also, the crime mystery wasn’t a genre I’d really had the opportunity to work with yet, and I thought if I could turn a stereotypical crime mystery into some kind of psychological thriller with elements of horror, drama, and comedy, it might unfold as an interesting film to watch.

Any films or filmmakers that inspired this film?

If you see SHATTER and also have a fascination with directors like David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky and David Cronenberg, you will probably be able to tell that these directors and their films had a heavy influence on our film’s style. We even included a number of Easter eggs related to David Lynch in various parts of the film, you should see if you can find them all! I mean, the film is about a murder in a small town after-all. I’ve also been a longtime fan of twist-endings and take a lot of inspiration from M. Night Shyamalan here, whose films really broke the mold for psychological horror, which is my favorite horror sub-genre.

What is the goal of the film for you?

I want to challenge hardcore mystery fans to piece together all the shards of broken glass in this giant puzzle that we created. There’s so much to unpack in this film that much of it will likely go over a lot of people’s heads if they aren’t paying attention, like how it actually plays out. Most of the key clues are hidden within just a few lines of dialogue. For me personally though, the goal is really just to have people watch it and take from it what they can. Everyone who volunteered to make this film put in 100’s of hours of work, so if there’s fans of crime thrillers, psychological thrillers and surreal horror films out there, it will mean a lot to everyone involved if even just a handful of fans and supporters of indie films could spare 90 minutes to check it out.

What has the journey been like getting the film into production?

By this time, it was a pretty routine process for us. We knew that this film would amount to the most challenging production we’ve ever done going in, so we put in 10x the amount of prep-work before we even started production. I think the script alone took over a year to write, going back and forth on how each scene could be done with little budget and constantly adjusting events to make sure that we could film each scene in a relatively reasonable amount of time. After that, there was a lot of discussions on the flow, pacing, dialogue and ending of the film. We put quite a lot of mindpower into the ending, and actually came up with 3 separate ones. So overall, getting it into production wasn’t too bad. However, slogging through post-production and subsequent distribution acquisition has been a real journey.

One thing you learned from this project?

Don’t make a feature film without “some” kind of budget. Haha. I think next time I will put a lot more energy into securing funding and getting a decent budget behind me before jumping into another adventure. I thought I knew how to make a film look good and sound good, even with a minimal crew and was banking on just taking my time to make sure everything looked and sounded as good as it could with the equipment that we had at the time. However, after each shoot, I pretty much realized that it would’ve taken a re-shoot in most cases to actually obtain the vision I had in my head. There’s just so much complexity in lighting, cinematography, positioning, acting, and environmental factors, that it would ultimately involve shooting the entire film twice. I’m pretty confident that with a few changes, we could’ve made it look and sound twice as good. However, with a proper budget, it would’ve made it easier to control for a lot of the interfering factors, as well as getting people back on set to fix any issues.

How can folks find you and your film online?

I do all of my work through Red Glass Films, which is basically set up like a horror film club for passionate fans, filmmakers and horror artists alike;  http://redglassfilms.com/

You can check out SHATTER on Midnight Releasing’s film catalog as well; https://midnightreleasing.com/filmcatalog/shatter/

Any last pieces of advice for fellow filmmakers?

Did I mention that making a film on a “beer money” budget isn’t the greatest idea? I probably should’ve just bought a 6-pack instead. Haha. My real advice would be that regardless of the budget – work with people who believe in the vision of the film, and more importantly, just want to have fun making it. It makes it feel less like a “job” and more like a bunch of friends getting together in an effort to push one another further than they ever thought they could go alone. The smaller the budget you have, the more important this is.

For more reviews and content stick with To Tony Productions and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog to stay up to date!